Mariner 9 was actually my first real induction into the world of UMSF. It wasn't a brief flyby with a few pics in AW&ST or Science very much after the fact...things kept coming.

Still remember waiting for the dust storm to settle, and what the hell were those dark spots in the Tharsis area? (Giant volcanoes, of course....duh! What did you think, what did you expect of a planet as dead as the Moon?)

Heady times indeed. Mariner 9 really disrupted conventional wisdom in so many ways. We learned that brief glimpses of a world never, ever paint the complete picture at all.

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A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.

Mariner-9 was the first planetary probe that reminds me of a modern mission to anything beyond the moon. It had a really high quality camera (although it had an afterimage problem that was solved on Mariner 10 and subsequent missions by use of a flashbulb) and returned thousands of images. Mariners 6 and 7 gave us our first taste but still has a relatively primitive feel.

Well, Mariner 9 will surely be remembered for its mapping of the red planet. Doing so, JPL produced 3 large 4-foot diameter photomosaic globes with the Mariner 9 pictures. The spacecraft circled Mars 698 times and returned about 7300 images!

I've read somewhere that the orbit of Mariner 9 would not decay for at least 50 years, so it will be around 2030 when the spacecraft might enter the thin Martian atmosphere? (maybe to celebrate the first humans on Mars mission )

4 years ago I prepared a series of articles on the subject of " Mapping the planet Mars & its Moons "...At JPL I asked about the Mariner 9 globes and they confirmed there's still one at JPL somewhere in a warehouse!What a shame, I believe they should show it during the upcoming JPL Open House weekend of 03 & 04 May 2008

I have a lot of information about these globes and to summarize: The task of planning & supervising the mosaicing of the 4-foot globes was assigned to Elmer Christensen, who designed the protractor to precisely locate the 1500 photographs on each globe.Each Mariner 9 mapping image was produced in one of three projections: "Mercator" for the equatorial latitudes, 'Polar Stereographic' for the polar regions and 'Lambert' for the intermediate regions.The first globe was re-photographed in 452 roughly rectangular segments, which allowed the construction of a 6-foot diameter globe for the von Karman auditorium of the JPL campus in pasadena CA.

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Great souvenirs to me too. I whish internet and UMSF had exist at that time since I was home for a full month (I was ill) rigth in time!Mariner 9 was the first "real" probe to my eyes just before Pionneer 10...

That's correct, Mars was the first "other world" - other than the Moon, mapped by a spacecraft !Moreover during Mariner IX, NASA learned important lessons about the use of the Deep Space Network concerning tracking, telemetry and data processing. In those days, JPL set up a new structure for the Space Flight Operations Facility with new computers!I'm keeping a few more photos for the UMSF space history photo of the month topic But do note the late Dr Carl Sagan on the right side of the 2nd photo (appreciate other IDs!):

We have 40th anniversary of Mariner 9 orbiter, so I think, that this very successful mission deserve little reminder.Here is morphed approach animation from 40 frames, which Mariner 9 photographed before orbit insertion from distance between 850 and 350 thousands km -Youtube.

Original images covers 43 hours interval, animation is speed up 1200× (so one second is 20 minutes).

Mars was in that time (11.-12.11.1971) covered by global dust storm, so only some features from Martian surface were visible (massive volcanoes in Tharsis, Valles Marineris, Hellas and Argyre Planitia, etc.).

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